A Towering Presence Above The Sands

Wilhelm was kind enough to draw my attention, both to the appearance of a strange, new tower, floating above the sands of the Desert of Ro in EverQuest and also to the release of some extremely detailed, year-long roadmaps for both the elder game and its sequel, EverQuest II, as they each approach their respective, significant anniversaries. Somewhat unexpectedly, Darkpaw have given PCGamer the exclusive on the roadmaps, about which more later, but anyone with an active account can log in and check out the tower, which is just what I did this morning.

It was an exceptionally easy and very enjoyable visit. As has been mentioned countless times, both here and on many other blogs, returning to an MMORPG you haven't played in a while can be a disorienting, frustrating experience. It hasn't been an age since I last played EQ but it has been over a year. 

I've posted about the game a few times since but the last time I actually played EQ was about eighteen months ago, when I got my mid-60s druid out to take a look at a holiday event in Lavastorm. She's my go-to character for checking out new event or holiday content simply because she has the ports to get  to wherever something might be happening in a matter of minutes rather than what can often feel like several hours. 

The druid got the call this morning to go see what was happening over in the desert. I logged in, expecting a lengthy wait as my client caught up with all those patches from the last year and a half but amazingly the whole thing took less than a minute to update. EG7 really should send someone from the Darkpaw team over to Standing Stone to show them how to do it.

My druid was still idling where I'd left her in Lavastorm. I cleared a spell slot, loaded Circle of Ro, cast it and arrived in the very southernmost tip of the Ro desert in a matter of seconds. Naturally, the tower was in the far north but I had Spirit of Wolf and Levitate up so it only took me a couple of minutes to get there. Druid is the way to go, when you need to travel. 

Unlike some MMORPGs I've gone back to after even shorter breaks, I had no immediate issues with remembering how thinks worked. I'm sure if I was going to play seriously, as in fight things that can fight back, I'd need a refresher course but outside of combat, returning to EverQuest feels like slipping on a comfortable pair of slippers.

I was also very favorably impressed by how things looked. The whole of the eastern side of Antonica, including all of the Desert of Ro got a visual revamp, back when Sony Online Entertainment was running the show and there was money for that kind of thing, so the graphics aren't quite as ancient as they would be on the other side of the continent but even that "updating" was more than a decade and a half ago. For a game about to celebrate a quarter of a century of continuous operation, it looks amazing.

It didn't take me long to find the tower. It was exactly where I imagined it would be from the screenshot Wilhelm imcluded in his post. There were a couple of other unfamiliar structures close by, which may or may not be connected, but I went straight to the stone platform with the eerie, ethereal blue glow and clicked on it.

Next thing I knew I was inside the tower, looking around a large room filled with boxes, paintings and other players. There was a vendor by the name of Miacallie Herlsas, currently selling nothing but a silver-plated roboboar mount, for which she only accepts a currency called "Timeless Tokens". You can earn those by exploring the eleven floors of the tower and defeating the monsters hiding behind the huge, armored doors.

From what I gather by reading the comments following the announcement on the forums, the event involves both a scavenger hunt around Norrath to find the key to each floor and a dungeon crawl to explore what you find behind each door the keys open. The floors will become available month by month and Miacallie will increase her stock as the year turns. 

It looks as though the floors will scale to your level, will be soloable (Possibly requiring the aid of a mercenary for the less solo-capable classes, if there still are any left in modern EQ.) and, at least according to reports from the Test Server, won't be all that challenging. I'm already intrigued. If it's as easy as reported, I'll definitely give it a go.

For now, though, I'm more than happy to have had the chance to explore the whole tower from outside the doors. It's beautifully designed and decorated, with a wide, spral staircase that's easy to navigate and a central shaft with a teleport system that allows you to move upwards three floors at a time if you're in a hurry.

At the top, the tower opens onto a flat roof, with a dragon statue and a book on a pedestal in the middle and a high wall all around. I was hoping to be able to get up onto the parapet and look down on the desert below but that doesn't seem possible. By turning the camera I was able to peer over the edge but all I could see was grey mist so I suspect the tower doesn't exist in the same dimensional space as the rest of Ro. Well, it wouldn't. It's in an instance.

The very best part about the whole thing, though, is the art on the walls. The press release talks about it being "resplendent with artwork from around Norrath" and they are not kidding. There's a different painting on every wall in the atrium and two paintings on each landing all the way up the tower. I make it twenty-eight in all but I wasn't actually counting as I took screenshots of them all. 

The standard of the illustration is extremely high. Almost every picture would look great as a poster, not just in my in-game house but in my actual house, where I'm sitting typing this. I can just about make out in the extremely small print of those 2024 roadmaps something about "Swag Stores", the virtual storefronts Darkpaw recently introduced for both games to sell physical merchandise to the faithful. I hope some of the new swag involves these paintings.

And that brings me neatly back to the PC Gamer exclusive I mentioned at the top of the post. I was a little surprised to find a) that Darkpaw would offer an exclusive to a specific third-party website and b) that a general gaming site like PCGamer would be interested enoough in couple of ancient MMORPGs to take them up on it but, having looked at the post, I think I can see what's going on here.

The article was penned by Russell Adderson, who seems not just to be generally enthusiastic about the anniiversaries but to have considerable form as a player and a fan of the franchise. I clicked through his name to see what else he'd written and found he'd authored a lengthy piece back in October of last year in which he introduced the PCGamer readership to the murky world of EQ Private Servers outside of the legally-sanctioned Project 1999.

As well as discussing the new Quarm server, a private Progression server aiming to cap out at the Planes of Power expansion, reckoned by some metathesiaphobes to be the high-water mark of EverQuest's twenty-five year run, Adderson also makes his case for "the original, 1999 version" being one of the best MMORPGs to play today. On the face of it, you might think that would be an invitation for Jenn Chan to call Legal but instead she seems to have chosen to treat it as an opportunity to get this evident super-fan inside the tent, facing out.

What with NCSoft's recent about-face on the City of Heroes rogue-no-more server, Homecoming, it does seem like a spirit of pragmatism may finally have reached the corporate offices - and not before time! 

Anyway, if nothing else, it seems the Anniversary Event and the publicity around it have prompted both Wilhelm and myself to log back into EverQuest once again. We'll see how many more times it happens this year.